The hostile media perception describes the tendency for partisans, people who have strong opinions or are highly involved in an issue, to regard neutral news coverage of the issue as biased against their own point of view (Vallone, Ross & Lepper, 1985). Previous research by Gunther and Schmitt (2004) has suggested that the hostile media perception is unique to only the mass media, and the authors have alluded this phenomenon to the high reach condition the mass media presents.

However, existing research has clearly mapped out how the number of people reached by the media contributed to the hostile media effect. It has not taken into consideration other possible contributing factors to the hostile media effect like the possible effects of mediated (versus non-mediated) content, as well as the �quality� of reach. We define the �quality� of reach to be who, and what kind of people, are the target audience perceived to be receiving the message. The �quality� of reach moves away from examining the audience as an undifferentiated mass, and is especially important in the conceptualization of the mass audience in the new media. Webster and Phelan (1997) suggested that with the introduction of new media, the mass audience will become increasingly fragmented into smaller subsets and polarized due to the increase of media-related choices and the structural characteristics of new media.

Using Meirick (2005)�s concept of perceived predisposition and our concept of perceived composition of audience, we seek to investigate if the extent of the hostile media effect is mediated not only by the perceived quantity, but also by the quality of reach of the message. Our study investigates if partisans form hostile media perceptions when confronted with articles on Singaporean politics on the weblogs platform, taking into account the tendency for the audience of weblogs to be fragmented and polarized due to the structural characteristics of the medium.